hawk breakfast

This morning's hawk story:

There is an area by the head of our marsh where hurricanes have created a jumble of fallen trees and broken branches surrounded by a dense brush of vines (especially catbriar and wild rose) with various forbs and shrubs. This impenetrable thicket has become a favorite overnight spot for many of the small passerines including various sparrows, Yellow-rumped Warblers, American Goldfinches, kinglets, etc. I have discovered that this is the place to watch these birds emerge shortly after sunrise from their nightly slumbers. But I am not alone in this discovery. Every morning, one or two accipiters hangs out in the surrounding trees hoping for easy pickings. This morning, an accipiter came zipping in at top speed, lower than eye level, to pick off a hapless little bird, carrying it up to a bare branch on one of the surrounding trees to pluck and eat. The hawk had its back to me but I could see that it was an adult male Cooper's Hawk with a blue back, a rounded tail with broad white tips to the feathers, a pale orange-buff nape and a large, slightly flat-topped head. What I could not see was what it had caught and, when I tried to circle round for a better view, it simply took off clutching its prey.

Carl Safina writes in with his own hawk story: "I was surfcasting the other morning and a merlin caught a passerine right in front of me over the breakers." Oddly enough, I had a similar experience years ago on a pelagic trip that left Montauk well before dawn. I was at the back of the boat during first light and over the ship's wake I was able to make out a Merlin who, while holding his position hovering in midair in the updraft from the boat, was nibbling on a breakfast passerine that he had just caught!

Eric Salzman